A Wanderer in Venice eBook

The picture, which I reproduce on the opposite page,
is on an easel just inside a door and you come upon
it suddenly. Not that any one could ever be completely
ready for it; but you pass from one room to the next,
and there it is—­all green and blue and
glory. Remember that Giorgione was not only a
Venetian painter but in some ways the most remarkable
and powerful of them all; remember that his fellow-pupil
Titian himself worshipped his genius and profited
by it, and that he even influenced his master Bellini;
and then remember that all the time you have been in
Venice you have seen nothing that was unquestionably
authentic and at the most only three pictures that
might be his. It is as though Florence had but
one Botticelli, or London but one Turner, or Madrid
but one Velasquez. And then you turn the corner
and find this!

[Illustration: THE TEMPEST FROM THE PAINTING
BY GIORGIONE In the Giovanelli Palace]

The Venetian art that we have hitherto seen has been
almost exclusively the handmaid of religion or the
State. At the Ducal Palace we found the great
painters exalting the Doges and the Republic; even
the other picture in Venice which I associate with
this for its pure beauty—­Tintoretto’s
“Bacchus and Ariadne”—­was probably
an allegory of Venetian success. In the churches
and at the Accademia we have seen the masters illustrating
the Testaments Old and New. All their work has
been for altars or church walls or large public places.
We have seen nothing for a domestic wall but little
mannered Longhis, without any imagination, or topographical
Canalettos and Guardis. And then we turn a corner
and are confronted by this!—­not only a beautiful
picture and a non-religious picture but a picture
painted to hang on a wall.

That was one of Giorgione’s innovations:
to paint pictures for private gentlemen. Another,
was to paint pictures of sheer loveliness with no
concern either with Scripture or history; and this
is one of his loveliest. It has all kinds of
faults—­and it is perfect. The drawing
is not too good; the painting is not too good; that
broken pillar is both commonplace and foolish; and
yet the work is perfect because a perfect artist made
it. It is beautiful and mysterious and a little
sad, all at once, just as an evening landscape can
be, and it is unmistakably the work of one who felt
beauty so deeply that his joyousness left him and
the melancholy that comes of the knowledge of transitoriness
took its place. Hence there is only one word
that can adequately describe it and that is Giorgionesque.

The picture is known variously as “The Tempest,”
for a thunderstorm is working up; as “The Soldier
and the Gipsy,” as “Adrastus and Hypsipyle,”
and as “Giorgione’s Family”.
In the last case the soldier watching the woman would
be the painter himself (who never married) and the
woman the mother of his child. Whatever we call
it, the picture remains the same: profoundly
beautiful, profoundly melancholy. A sense of impending
calamity informs it. A lady observing it remarked
to me, “Each is thinking thoughts unknown to
the other”; and they are thoughts of unhappy
morrows.